Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.

I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres... I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.

I always know a lie when I hear it, and the effect it has on me is no good at all. I go berserk just forcing myself not to go berserk, just trying to see truth in the lie, to see it in full context, and in a dimension in which it has got to be more than just a lie, possibly the profoundest kind of truth.

In the time of your life, live-so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches.

Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met.

Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.

Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.